Herbert, Frank - Destination Void 2 The Jesus Incident

VIP免费

2024-12-02 0 0 604.41KB 312 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

1. Destination Void

-> 2. The Jesus Incident

3. The Lazarus Effect

4. The Ascension Factor

The Jesus Incident

Frank Herbert

Bill Ransom

1979 (16th printing 1987)

There is a gateway to the imagination you must enter before you are conscious

and the keys to the gate are symbols. You can carry ideas through the gate . .

. but you must carry the ideas in symbols.

-- Raja Flattery, Chaplain/Psychiatrist

SOMETHING WENT "Tick."

He heard it quite distinctly -- a metallic sound. There it went again: "Tick."

He opened his eyes and was rewarded with darkness, an absolute lack of radiant

energy . . . or of receptors to detect energy.

Am I blind?

"Tick."

He could not place the source, but it was out there -- wherever out there was.

The air felt cold in his throat and lungs. But his body was warm. He realized

that he lay very lightly on a soft surface. He was breathing. Something

tickled his nose, a faint odor of . . . pepper?

"Tick."

He cleared his throat. "Anybody there?"

No answer. Speaking hurt his throat.

What am I doing here?

The soft surface beneath him curved up around his shoulders to support his neck

and head. It encased hips and legs. This was familiar. It ignited distant

associations. It was . . . what? He felt that he should know about such a

surface.

After all, I . . .

"Tick."

Panic seized him. Who am I?

The answer came slowly, thawed from a block of ice which contained everything he

should know.

I am Raja Flattery.

Ice melted in a cascade of memories.

I'm Chaplain/Psychiatrist on the Voidship Earthling. We . . . we. . .

Some of the memories remained frozen.

He tried to sit up but was restrained by softly cupping bands over his chest and

wrists. Now, he felt connectors withdraw from the veins at his wrists.

I'm in a hyb tank!

He had no memory of going into hybernation. Perhaps memory thawed more slowly

than flesh. Interesting. But there were a few memories now, frigid in their

flow, and deeply disturbing.

I failed.

Moonbase directed me to blow up our ship rather than let it roam space as a

threat to humankind. I was to send the message capsule back to Moonbase . . .

and blow up our ship.

Something had prevented him from . . . something . . .

But he remembered the project now.

Project Consciousness.

And he, Raja Flattery, had held a key role in that project.

Chaplain/Psychiatrist. He had been one of the crew.

Umbilicus crew.

He did not dwell on the birth symbology in that label. Clones had more

important tasks. They were clones on the crew, all with Lon for a middle name.

Lon meant clone as Mac meant son of. All the crew -- clones. They were

doppelgangers sent far into insulating space, there to solve the problem of

creating an artificial consciousness.

Dangerous work. Very dangerous. Artificial consciousness had a long history of

turning against its creators. It went rogue with ferocious violence. Even many

of the uncloned had perished in agony.

Nobody could say why.

But the project's directors at Moonbase were persistent. Again and again, they

sent the same cloned crew into space. Features flashed into Flattery's mind as

he thought the names: a Gerrill Timberlake, a John Bickel, a Prue Weygand. . .

Raja Flattery . . . Raja Lon Flattery.

He glimpsed his own face in a long-gone mirror: fair hair, narrow features . .

. disdainful . . .

And the Voidships carried others, many others. They carried cloned Colonists,

gene banks in hyb tanks. Cheap flesh to be sacrificed in distant explosions

where the uncloned would not be harmed. Cheap flesh to gather data for the

uncloned. Each new venture into the void went out with a bit more information

for the wakeful umbilicus crew and those encased in hyb . . .

-- As I am encased now.

Colonists, livestock, plants -- each Voidship carried what it needed to create

another Earth. That was the carrot luring them onward. And the ship -- certain

death if they failed to create an artificial consciousness. Moonbase knew that

ships and clones were cheap where materials and inexpensive energy were abundant

. . . as they were on the moon.

"Tick."

Who is bringing me out of hybernation?

And why?

Flattery thought about that while he tried to extend his globe of awareness into

the unresponsive darkness.

Who? Why?

He knew that he had failed to blow up his ship after it had exhibited

consciousness . . . using Bickel as an imprint on the computer they had built .

. .

I did not blow up the ship. Something prevented me from . . .

Ship!

More memories flooded into his mind. They had achieved the artificial

consciousness to direct their ship . . . and it had whisked them far across

space to the Tau Ceti system.

Where there were no inhabitable planets.

Moonbase probes had made certain of that much earlier. No inhabitable planets.

It was part of the frustration built into the project. No Voidship could be

allowed to choose the long way to Tau Ceti sanctuary. Moonbase could not allow

that. It would be too tempting for the cloned crew -- breed our own

replacements, let our descendants find Tau Ceti. And to hell with Project

Consciousness! If they voted that course, the Chaplain/Psychiatrist was charged

to expose the empty goal and stand ready with the destruct button.

Win, lose or draw -- we were supposed to die.

And only the Chaplain/Psychiatrist had been allowed to suspect this. The serial

Voidships and their cloned cargo had one mission: gather information and send

it back to Moonbase.

Ship.

That was it, of course. They had created much more than consciousness in their

computer and its companion system which Bickel had called "the Ox." They had

made Ship. And Ship had whisked them across space in an impossible eyeblink.

Destination Tau Ceti.

That was, after all, the built-in command, the target programmed into their

computer. But where there had been no inhabitable planet, Ship had created one:

a paradise planet, an earth idealized out of every human dream. Ship had done

this thing, but then had come Ship's terrible demand: "You must decide how you

will WorShip Me!"

Ship had assumed attributes of God or Satan. Flattery was never sure which.

But he had sensed that awesome power even before the repeated demand.

"How will you WorShip? You must decide!"

Failure.

They never could satisfy Ship's demand. But they could fear. They learned a

full measure of fear.

"Tick."

He recognized that sound now: the dehyb timer/monitor counting off the

restoration of life to his flesh.

But who had set this process into motion?

"Who's there?"

Silence and the impenetrable darkness answered.

Flattery felt alone and now there was a painful chill around his flesh, a signal

that skin sensation was returning to normal.

One of the crew had warned them before they had thrown the switch to ignite the

artificial consciousness. Flattery could not recall who had voiced the warning

but he remembered it.

"There must be a threshold of consciousness beyond which a conscious being takes

on attributes of God."

Whoever said it had seen a truth.

Who is bringing me out of hyb and why?

"Somebody's there! Who is it?"

Speaking still hurt his throat and his mind was not working properly -- that icy

core of untouchable memories.

"Come on! Who's there?"

He knew somebody was there. He could feel the familiar presence of. . .

Ship!

"Okay, Ship. I'm awake."

"So you assume."

That chiding voice could never sound human. It was too impossibly controlled.

Every slightest nuance, every inflection, every modulated resonance conveyed a

perfection which put it beyond the reach of humans. But that voice told him he

once more was a pawn of Ship. He was a small cog in the workings of this

Infinite Power which he had helped to release upon an unsuspecting universe.

This realization filled him with remembered terrors and an immediate awesome

fear of the agonies which Ship might visit upon him for his failures. He was

tormented by visions of Hell . . .

I failed. . . I failed . . . I failed . . .

St. Augustine asked the right question: "Does freedom come from chance or

choice?" And you must remember that quantum mechanics guarantees chance.

-- Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

USUALLY, MORGAN Oakes took out his nightside angers and frustrations in long

strides down any corridor of the ship where his feet led him.

Not this time! he told himself.

He sat in shadows and sipped a glass of astringent wine. Bitter, but it washed

the taste of the ship's foul joke from his tongue. The wine had come at his

demand, a demonstration of his power in these times of food shortages. The

first bottle from the first batch. How would they take it groundside when he

ordered the wine improved?

Oakes raised the glass in an ancient gesture: Confusion to You, Ship!

The wine was too raw. He put it aside.

Oakes knew the figure he cut, sitting here trembling in his cubby while he

stared at the silent com-console beside his favorite couch. He increased the

light slightly.

Once more the ship had convinced him that its program was running down. The

ship was getting senile. He was the Chaplain/Psychiatrist and the ship tried to

poison him! Others were fed from shiptits -- not frequently and not much, but

it happened. Even he had been favored once, before he became Ceepee, and he

still remembered the taste -- richly satisfying. It was a little like the stuff

called "burst" which Lewis had developed groundside. An attempt to duplicate

elixir. Costly stuff, burst. Wasteful. And not elixir -- no, not elixir.

He stared at the curved screen of the console beside him. It returned a dwarfed

reflection of himself: an overweight, heavy-shouldered man in a one-piece suit

of shipcloth which appeared vaguely gray in this light. His features were

strong: a thick chin, wide mouth, beaked nose and bushy eyebrows over dark

eyes, a bit of silver at the temples. He touched his temples. The reduced

reflection exaggerated his feeling that he had been made small by Ship's

treatment of him. His reflection showed him his own fear.

I will not be tricked by a damned machine!

The memory brought on another fit of trembling. Ship had refused him at the

shiptits often enough that he understood this new message. He had stopped with

Jesus Lewis at a bank of corridor shiptits.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

1.DestinationVoid->2.TheJesusIncident3.TheLazarusEffect4.TheAscensionFactorTheJesusIncidentFrankHerbertBillRansom1979(16thprinting1987)Thereisagatewaytotheimaginationyoumustenterbeforeyouareconsciousandthekeystothegatearesymbols.Youcancarryideasthroughthegate...butyoumustcarrytheideasinsymbols.--Raj...

展开>> 收起<<

Herbert, Frank - Destination Void 2 The Jesus Incident.pdf

共312页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Herbert, Frank - Destination Void 2 The Jesus Incident

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: